THE incredibly well-preserved skeleton of the largest mammal to walk the Earth is going up for auction for more than £440,000.

Twelve thousand years after walking the barren steppes of Siberia, this mighty woolly mammoth is available as a museum centrepiece or an art collector’s ultimate masterpiece.

The majestic skeleton with its 10ft long tusks is being put on show at the Lyon-Brotteax railway station in France as the countdown begins to it being auctioned by one the world’s leading showrooms next month.

At 11ft 2in inches tall and 17ft from tusks to tail, the mammoth has been the joy of a private collector although no details have been released about where it has been kept or why it is being auctioned.

A YouTube video has been produced by Aguttes and shows the mammoth being pieced together bone by bone.

The auction house said: “The one here is the world’s biggest, privately-owned specimen. Sales of this kind of specimen are very rare.”

Aguttes, which he has become renown for selling rare fossils after achieving a £1million bid for a dinosaur skeleton last year, say mammoth skeletons fascinate both the scientific community as well as art collectors.

“This immediately sparked off a debate between scientists, who wanted to retain control of the fossil market, and modern art collectors, who were beginning to take an interest and pushing prices up,” say the auctioneers.

In 2006, the first ever complete mammoth skeleton was bought by the Cave des Vignerons de Montfrin winery in the Gard region of southern France and has become their prized natural history exhibit.

Subsequently, Damien Hirst created Gone but not Forgotten – the gilded skeleton of a10ft tall mammoth – which was auctioned in 2014 in support of the fight against AIDS, raising £9 million.

Hirst explained his fascination for mammoths, and said of his sculpture: “The mammoth comes from a time and place that we cannot ever fully understand.

"Despite its scientific reality, it has attained an almost mythical status and I wanted to play with these ideas of legend, history and science by gilding the skeleton and placing it within a monolithic gold tank.

Aguttes

The skeleton is said to be the biggest privately-owned specimen

“It's such an absolute expression of mortality, but I've decorated it to the point where it's become something else, I've pitched everything I can against death to create something more hopeful, it is gone but not forgotten.”

Woolly mammoths – scientific name Mammuthus primigenius – began vanishing from their northern hemisphere foraging grounds as the Pleistocene period was coming to an end around 10,000 years ago.

Remarkably, small populations hung to existence on Wrangel Islsand in the Arctic Ocean for another 6,000 years, finally dying out around 2,000 BC.

The huge, lumbering creatures faced a perfect storm of threats: climate change diminishing their tundra habitat and early human hunters prizing its skin, meat and ivory.

Speculation still continues that mammoths could be brought back into existence using advanced DNA technology.